May be.
But clearly the time of appeasing and ignoring Saddam is passing.
There is no way on earth this Administration is going to wait until Saddam announces that he is the new North Korea, and will now rain hell's fire on anyone who pisses him off.
The Al Qaeda and now the NKs serve as book ends to possibly the most important lesson America and the West must learn if we are serious about world peace: Never never never let terrorists or despots get strategic forces.
Al Qaeda sserves to teach that in this day and age even tiny groups can acquire amazingly destructive tools and carry out plots to use those tools if ignored long enough.
North Korea demonstrates that even negotiations by a Noble Prize winning peacemaker are useless if the party negotiating just doesn't care about keeping its word.
Iraq, just maybe, has not developed serious amounts of WMDs...yet.
The danger of continuing the policy of the 90's...do basically nothing....has born bitter fruit.
And the world community of today, like that of pre-WWII Europe and USA are too immature to tell the real bad guys from the good guys.
The real bad guys of the 30's, Hitler and Stalin, were treated with kid gloves by broad groups of society.
The real bad guys of today, Saddam and the NK despot, are treated the same way.
It takes real leadership to cut through the popular illusions and take a stand for liberty.
We must go forward against Iraq.
NK can wait for better opportunities and options. The day of forcing NK down by intimidation is over: they have millions of hostages in their neighboring countries.
Ed